The invention relates to keypunching with electronic adding machines, and more particularly to an improved method and apparatus improving operator accuracy, speed of operation, entry verification and mispunch identification avoiding the need for the additional printing of extra printed tapes for comparison.
One of the most trivial yet important aspects of keypunching is accuracy during the continual operation of electronic adding machines over extended periods or for long series of numbers. Employers expect accuracy from their employees, yet sometimes accuracy is impeded by personal matters, time constraints or boredom. Many clerical personnel do so much keypunching in fact, that the act becomes a seemingly innate, unconscious act. Keypunching in its most simple form, adding machine operation, may well be the pinnacle of repetitious mundane job duties but almost all financial professionals are forced to spend some time operating adding machines. As one moves down the continuum from professional to clerical status, the reliance upon the adding machine, as an operator thereof, increases as a greater proportion of job duties involve data entry clerical tasks requiring the use of adding machines. A controller, for instance, might spend only ten minutes per day in front of the adding machine, whereas an insurance claims adjuster may spend five or more hours each day operating the adding machine. Assuming that there are far more employees at the clerical level than the controller level, it follows that there are more medium to heavy adding machine users than there are light users.
Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of entering a long series of numbers knows just how poor eye-hand coordination can be, when it is almost impossible to enter a hundred numbers correctly the first time. It seems like an insurmountable task, yet hundreds of thousands of business people each day spend significant amounts of time keypunching. When such people enter a series of a hundred or so numbers, he or she is already convinced that at least one and probably several errors are going to occur. In fact, the keypunch operator does not even give himself or herself the benefit of the doubt, the resulting error is going to be double-checked. It is an industry standard to double-check long series of numbers. Auditors, Claims Adjusters and Clerks from across the world know that totals are meaningless unless they are double-checked. Conventionally, this double-checking process requires the second entry and second printing of the adding machine tape printout for comparison and verification of totals.
Double-checking is not a major problem when the totals agree. What happens, however, when after entering a series of numbers twice, two different totals result? Then, the already frustrated adding machine operator proceeds to align the tapes side-by-side, and tries to visually scan for differences. Maybe the totals are only $10.00 apart, and the operator sees the entry for $40.00 and one for $50.00, and thus identifies the difference. What if, on the other hand, the difference is more typically a less readily identifiable figure, and it is spread over several entries? Obviously, a person's patience is effectively pushed to the limit in this modern-day contest of man versus machine. The clerk is making many decisions at this point. Do I enter the series a third time? Do I write down all the differences I can see and try to come up with the total difference? Should I just throw out both tapes, and start from scratch? Even somebody who has never turned on an adding machine can sympathize with the operator's plight.
There exists a need therefore, for the ready and perhaps immediate identification of keypunch errors as they may occur to alert the operator of the potential for such errors facilitating the verification and correction of such erroneous keypunch entries before they may become manifested and not readily identifiable within a lengthy series of computations. It would be further desirable to avoid the need for the manual and visual comparison of long series of computations when discrepancies do occur.